ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Humankind has given itself the scientific name Homo Sapiens—man the wise—
because our mental capacities are so important to our everyday lives and our sense of
self. The field of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, attempts to understand intelligent
entities. Thus, one reason to study it is to learn more about ourselves. But unlike
philosophy and psychology, which are also concerned with intelligence, AI strives to
build intelligent entities as well as understand them. Another reason to study AI is that
these constructed intelligent entities are interesting and useful in their own right. AI
has produced many significant and impressive products even at this early stage in its
development. Although no one can predict the future in detail, it is clear that
computers with human-level intelligence (or better) would have a huge impact on our
everyday lives and on the future course of civilization.
AI is one of the newest disciplines. It was formally initiated in 1956, when the name
was coined, although at that point work had been under way for about five years.
Along with modern genetics, it is regularly cited as the "field I would most like to be
in" by scientists in other disciplines. A student in physics might reasonably feel that
all the good ideas have already been taken by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the rest,
and that it takes many years of study before one can contribute new ideas. AI, on the
other hand, still has openings for a full-time Einstein.
Definitions of artificial intelligence according to eight recent textbooks are shown in
points (a-h) below. These definitions vary along two main dimensions. The ones on
top 4 are concerned with thought processes and reasoning, whereas the ones on the
bottom 4 address behaviour.
a) "The exciting new effort to make computers think . . . machines with minds, in
the full and literal sense" (Haugeland, 1985)
b) "[The automation of] activities that we associate with human thinking,
activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning..."(Bellman,
1978)
c) "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence
when performed by people" (Kurzweil, 1990)
 d) "The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment,
people are better" (Rich and Knight, 1 99 1 )
e) "The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models"
(Charniak and McDermott, 1985)
f) "The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and
act" (Winston, 1992)
g) "A field of study that seeks to explain and emulate intelligent behaviour in
terms of computational processes" (Schalkoff, 1 990)
h) "The branch of computer science that is concerned with the automation of
intelligent behaviour" (Luger and Stubblefield, 1993)
2. ACTING HUMANLY: THE TURING TEST APPROACH
The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a
satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. Turing defined intelligent behaviour
as the ability to achieve human-level performance in all cognitive tasks, sufficient to
fool an interrogator. Roughly speaking, the test he proposed is that the computer
should be interrogated by a human via a teletype, and passes the test if the interrogator
cannot tell if there is a computer or a human at the other end. For now, programming a
computer to pass the test provides plenty to work on. The computer would need to
possess the following capabilities:
a) Natural Language Processing to enable it to communicate successfully in
English (or some other human language);
b) Knowledge Representation to store information provided before or during the
interrogation;
c) Automated Reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and
to draw new conclusions;
d) Machine Learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and
extrapolate patterns.
Turing's test deliberately avoided direct physical interaction between the interrogator
and the computer, because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary for
intelligence. However, the so-called total Turing Test includes a video signal so that
the interrogator can test the subject's perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for
the interrogator to pass physical objects "through the hatch." To pass the total Turing
Test, the computer will need
a) Computer Vision to perceive objects, and
b) Robotics to move them about.
3. ACTING RATIONALLY: THE RATIONAL AGENT APPROACH
Acting rationally means acting so as to achieve one's goals, given one's beliefs. An
agent is just something that perceives and acts. In this approach, AI is viewed as the
study and construction of rational agents. In the "laws of thought" approach to AI, the
whole emphasis was on correct inferences. Making correct inferences is sometimes
part of being a rational agent, because one way to act rationally is to reason logically
to the conclusion that a given action will achieve one's goals, and then to act on that
conclusion. On the other hand, correct inference is not all of rationality; because there
are often situations where there is no provably correct thing to do, yet something must
still be done. There are also ways of acting rationally that cannot be reasonably said to
involve inference. For example, pulling one's hand off of a hot stove is a reflex action
that is more successful than a slower action taken after careful deliberation.